All the more reason, then, to banish them from her heart.
“I’ll meet Thomas even if you don’t come, you know,” Mary said. Then added more softly, “But it’s best for me, Ester, if you come. You know it is. I’ll pay you, and that makes it a simple employment, doesn’t it—one whose only requirement is your presence.” Her lips curved. “And this way, you see, my choices won’t be your responsibility. Or”—she added—“your business.”
Ester’s heart beat once, twice—and on the third she knew she’d accept. Was it craven? But there was no stopping Mary. And surely the money could appear at no better time: coins for candles, and ink. For the plan forming in Ester’s mind.
Mary nodded briskly: the agreement was sealed. She rapped on the divider. “Why are we stopped so near home?”
The driver called back, his voice rich with amusement. “’Tis a second theater now.”
“What sort of theater?” called Mary.
But it was a white-haired, round-bodied woman standing outside her window who answered. “Two lads, miss, caught together in a dalliance at the Rose Inn. And one soon to find himself in great trouble, for his father comes and will have none of this new morality between men.” A fresh wave of noise arose from ahead of the coach. “See here how they pull the one out?” The woman’s merry laughter obscured whatever she said next.
Ester spoke to the driver through the flap. “And you’ve stopped our coach to watch?”
“Not I,” he said mildly. “Look yourself.”
Ester hesitated, then crowded beside Mary at her window and understood the driver’s meaning. The narrow street was blocked with people craning as though at an entertainment. A jumble of dray-carts all pointed like a bristle of spears toward the doorway of an inn, where a slim, muscular young man had staggered out in a convulsion of laughter. He was naked save the sheet he held to his groin, but at the sight of the gathered crowd he made a ball of the sheet and threw it at them, his member bobbing half-mast like a flag in a brown thatch, and as Mary leaned against Ester to see better, he flung his arms wide and bowed so low, the men behind him roared with laughing disgust, and someone ran to restore him his sheet, but he refused it.
Even through the rigid stays of Mary’s dress, Ester felt Mary’s shudder of laughter.
“Here?” A man’s voice was shouting in the din. “Show me my son!”
The crowd settled into a sharp hush as a man pushed his way to the front. Ester saw with a start that it was Benjamin HaLevy.
A fringe of white hair showed beneath HaLevy’s dark wig, which rode askew above his dark, handsome face, so similar to his son Manuel’s. His nostrils were flared, his mouth dreadful in its severity. Two burly draymen in his path stepped back before his fury.
Without thinking, Ester rocked back from the window and stumbled her way out of the coach and into the thicket of the crowd. Beside her a low voice sounded, a man chuckling to his companion. “See now the Jew. He’ll whip his son for sporting with another man, though the king’s court itself is reported to be full of such games.”
“I’d whip the buggerers myself,” laughed the other.
“I too! But even so the Jew is different—he hates all royal notions, for he hates the king.”
Hastily Ester pushed forward, ignoring sounds of protest, aiming to where the crowd was thickest. As she broke through to the front, she saw Benjamin HaLevy pull Alvaro from the tavern. Alvaro’s doublet was askew and half-buttoned. His father’s fist was bunching the fabric of the son’s blouse so it tore. But it was Alvaro’s thin body, not the cloth, that seemed to rend—and when Benjamin HaLevy released his grip and strode away, Alvaro stumbled behind as though the cobbles beneath his feet were less than solid. Pausing an instant for balance, he gazed about in slow comprehension at the hooting, bucking crowd, and Ester wanted to take him in her own thin arms and race him to some imagined place of safety.
Then his eyes found Ester’s and fastened on them in relief and desperation, confessing mutely to her, in a language she at last understood, that he was cursed.
The rabbi sat by the fire.
She thought: he hasn’t moved since I departed hours ago. She thought: he’s barely moved since he banished me from scribing; without any to help him study he might as well be in irons. She thought: even now, his imprisonment under the Inquisition continues. This time by his choice.
Did she blame him? Would that make it easier to do what she was about to do?
She entered the house and shut the heavy door behind her. The rabbi turned patiently toward the sound. She thought: his beloved face.
His eyelids were pale parchment; his form thin, frailer even than she’d noted before. There was no restlessness in his expression, nor hope. Nor rage at the heavens for the life stolen from him.
He was her friend—the only one in the Amsterdam congregation who’d understood her plight, and Isaac’s, and tried to save them. And he was her teacher—his mind like a sounding line probing the depths of each verse and text. But she could no longer lie to herself, so with a pang she let herself know what she’d felt in those last months of her studies with him: that she understood the texts they’d read more deeply than he.
The thought that her abilities exceeded the rabbi’s made her wish to protect him all the more. To fortify herself, she summoned the image of Alvaro’s pleading face: a boy who would sink because he was not hard enough to deafen himself to jeers, turn, and strike his father’s hand from his collar.
She addressed the rabbi. “A letter comes this day from Florence.” She spoke as though indifferent. “How shall I dispose of it?”
The rabbi was silent. How many weeks, she wondered, since he’d received any letter? Without recourse to a scribe, his correspondence had withered.
“Perhaps you prefer I don’t read it to you.”
She felt his mind in its loneliness. She felt it turning her words, sounding the depth of her anger. “Read this letter to me,” he said softly. “Please.”
She moved toward him, but stopped midway across the room. She withdrew from the pocket of her skirt a paper—the playbill from the theater. A pang of doubt took her. She unfolded it quietly. The Lovers’ Masque, the paper said. A Spectacle of the Foolish Hearte.
“From whom is the letter?” said the rabbi.
“From one Daniel Lusitano,” she said. A name she’d culled from memory during the last of the coach ride. The Lusitano sons, former pupils of the rabbi, had been some years older than Ester, but had left Amsterdam long ago when their father’s trade called him to Florence.
“He says”—she was speaking more loudly than necessary, she realized. She lowered her voice—“he studied with you in Amsterdam.”
Slowly the rabbi nodded. “I remember,” he said.
Her throat was dry. She continued. “To the esteemed Rabbi HaCoen Mendes,” she said. “I write with my soul torn by the folly of the people I dwell among: this congregation of our people in Florence, which has served as a beacon of learning to those in darkness, yet now welcomes its own destruction. I turn to you now in respect and admiration.” She looked at the rabbi as she spoke—she looked directly at his closed eyes and willed him to see her. “For your learning is great,” she added. “Greater than many rabbis whose fame exceeds your own.”
The rabbi listened, his brow furrowed.